I'm not sure what you're saying "is it" to. If your insurance does not go up when living in an area with conditions like downtown SF right now, it's only because you're in a risk pool with other people not having those problems. It still does no good to deny those problems like it isn't a clear breakdown of society. And if you're talking about San Francisco your rent is hardly a baseline of affordable as you said, so I'm not sure why you make that comparison or why greedy developers price gouging is somehow NOT also a sign of dysfunctional society.
Insurance can definitely reduce risk if its cost or availability is tied to risk-reducing measures (giving the policyholder an incentive).
For example a health policy requiring health check-ups, or insisting on security or safety measures for a home policy. Or, in a weaker form, giving a discount if the customer can demonstrate they are reducing their risk.
There's also the direct intervention side: in theory, an insurance company covering people in an area for theft could lobby for improved policing. Or a car insurance company could lobby for car safety measures. In practice though they probably prefer the higher risk as that brings higher premiums...
Ideology dictates how people respond to reality. They will insist crime is not bad. They will dig up statistics to fit their narrative -people are over reporting, people are underreporting- anything to deny that property crime is actually worse.
Yes the 80s were bad. You’d get mugged is some parts of the city. However B&E, crime against vehicles and shoplifting were not at the levels today. They insist it’s people who are starving who steal ignoring that it’s organized gangs doing this.
Without care this can turn into North American Sao Paolo where people have compounds with armed guards in the wealthy neighborhoods and the middle class suffer street crime.
On my last 3-day business trip to San Francisco I stepped over multiple unconscious bodies on the sidewalk daily to get from my hotel to my office, walked into a pharmacy that had had shelves cleaned out minutes earlier, and saw a ton of cars with signs asking to not be robbed because no valuables were kept in the car. The backdrop was signs extolling the success of the city in social justice. Such a stark contrast between the city's obvious problems and some alternate reality it lives in.
Edit: oh, and I accidentally stepped on (and broke) a crack pipe on the sidewalk and had to run from the angry person it belonged to. Remind me to refuse to accept another business trip there.
It’s never been safe to leave a car with valuables in big cities. That’s not an SF thing, and even if one insists it’s an SF thing for the sake of argument, it’s not a new SF thing it’s been like that for decades.
Many US cities have been remarkably safe for the last 20 years. Of course you shouldn't let your guard down entirely -- don't leave cash out on your dashboard, lock your door at night, etc. -- but it certainly feels like 2020 was a turning point of safety within US cities.
Why do people claim that "the police can't solve this" about issues that the police could absolutely solve by just enforcing the law?
Post some police outside the store. When someone runs in, steals a bunch of items, and runs out, arrest them. What am I not understanding about law enforcement in this situation?
These are professional criminals who raid multiple stores a day, every day.
You don't have to catch and convict them every time to be effective. If you caught and convicted even 2% of the crimes, crime would be massively lower within 6 months, because it's the same people doing it over and over.
That assumes that they are actually convicted and put in jail. The DA doesn’t believe that putting people in jail is effective at reducing crime, and so just doesn’t.
The DA you are referring to was removed from office five months ago and replaced by attorneys who quit his office in disgust and led the effort to recall him.
SF still has a lot of work to do but Chessa Boudin is no longer running the SF DA's office.
how does the cost of this compare with say UBI? bearing in mind there's a cost to illegal/legalized civil forfeiture theft, or caging more people, as well
Are you laboring under the delusion that these same criminals wouldn't happily pocket the UBI in between shoplifting raids for which they face almost no consequences?
You’re making the error in belief that criminals primarily commit crime out of necessity, rather than out of inculcated behavioral habit. At least in the US, most crimes are committed by people who were brought up from a young age in a culture of criminality. There is no ethical or moral dilemma on the part of the criminal, their behavior is fully in line with the social mores of their cultural upbringing.
The folks running in shoplifting and robbery gangs are not stealing a loaf of bread to feed their starving children, criminality is their profession.
> I do see research finding strong negative correlations between violent crime and minimum incomes
Yes, poverty and crime do correlate strongly. Although be careful about conflating violent crime and property crime with each other.
That said, correlation is not causation. There is likely /some/ causative element between poverty and crime, but it is not absolute, rather poverty is also strongly correlated with other non-criminal behaviors that both lead to poverty and lead to crime. There is definitely a cultural element in wealthy countries to generational poverty, just as there is a cultural element to criminality.
If we can break that cycle for people, it benefits society as a whole, and I think it's worth investing what we can as a society into doing so, however current research certainly doesn't support deferment of responsibility for criminality because of poverty.
I think the rest of the developed world provides good evidence that you can punish people for crimes without abusing civil asset forfeiture. It's pretty bad-faith to conflate the two.
We’re talking about America where it is part of policing by policy and norm. I’m responding to calls for increasing police in America. It’s pretty bad faith to defend calls for increasing police in America by saying they could steal less if they were in other countries
Except that's just not true. The US has thousands of mostly independent police departments. Some use civil asset forfeiture (fewer, now that the supreme court has stepped in). Many don't.
What a small town in Alabama does has no connection with what the SFPD does.
You don't need that. We have physical police officers who are sometimes present in some places and they don't do anything. They are on a tacit strike and have been for years.
If you look at SF compstat, larceny-theft is on pace to be about 34,000 citywide this year, which will put thefts for this year lower than every year 2013-2019, and higher than 2020-21, which were exceptionally low (pandemic).
If you look at the FBI UCR report you'll see that clearance of theft is on a 40-year-long monotonic decline. Theft rate was about the same around 1990, but the SFPD clearance rate was 3-5x higher back then. This has nothing to do with the DA and everything to do with the SFPD being a civic cancer who refuse to do their jobs.
> This has nothing to do with the DA and everything to do with the SFPD being a civic cancer who refuse to do their jobs.
Maybe...but the two might be related, no? After some years of the police observing that the people they arrest are released with no charges and no prosecution, why would they bother to keep arresting people? It sounds demoralizing.
You make a good point that political propaganda is driving this conversation about crime, largely because Fox and TPTB of conservative media think they can blame crime on Democrats to increase Republicans' chances of winning in the midterm.
At the same time, I've lived in US cities for the past 7 years. 6 months ago, I moved to a small town. Why? It wasn't because I don't like city amenities, or I can't afford city prices. I moved because the city I lived in didn't feel safe. Between the rampant bike theft, the rampant auto theft, the break-ins, and the muggings, I did not feel like trying to walk and bike around my city any more. It just felt too risky.
The guys post is interesting to sort of see the change in society.
Times were that the shop owner would physically stop shop lifters. Now we mostly have low wage employees in shops. Understandable that they don't want the risk of injury and liability so they don't stop shoplifters.
Ok, so we hire specialized employees ostensibly trained in security. But due to liability reasons they aren't allowed to physically stop shoplifters. That makes them basically useless.
Ok, so well there's always cops. But they have a similar cost benefit analysis as the other parties with the same result. It's not worth it to the individual cops to intervene. Why risk going viral over some druggie stealing $100 worth of stuff?
The DA/politicians have a similar calculus. Why spend $50k locking up some druggie because they stole $100 worth of stuff? And why risk the blowback of a police brutality incident?
> Why risk going viral over some druggie stealing $100 worth of stuff?
I'm sure that's a factor, but physical altercations also bring risk to the cop. I don't know how generous their disability pensions are, but I suspect it's better for them and their family to still be able to work. Also, anyone in the US can be armed which tends to raise the stakes that cops perceive with every interaction - look at their training material/propaganda sometime and it paints a very adversarial picture.
"The DA/politicians have a similar calculus. Why spend $50k locking up some druggie because they stole $100 worth of stuff?"
It's not their money, so many of them have no problem spending it.
That's not to mention those who personally benefit from putting more people in jail because they have investments in the prison industry, get some sort of bribe/kickback, or just have an easier time getting elected/appointed because they're "tough on crime".
What happens after the arrest? In the current system, the perpetrator get logged into the system and released after they promise to appear in court. In 6-18 months the court will issue some fines. Meanwhile the person is free to continue petty crime
No, that's just right-wing propaganda. The threshold of felony theft was raised to $950. Before and after that change, California had one of the lowest thresholds in the nation. In Texas, for example, the threshold is $2500. So crime in California can't be explained by the change.
Not sure if comparison to Texas is appropriate. Gun laws and property protection laws are very different there and act is a big deterrent for such crimes.
That only works if being locked up is a deterrent.
If you have large numbers of mentally ill and/or drug addicted people living on the streets with little to lose then it's pretty easy to do a DDOS to the rest of society.
Like drug dealing, you really want to catch the people a couple of steps up the chain, as the people on the frontline are just disposable cannon fodder and easily replaceable.
This is the kind of analysis paralysis that gets us nowhere. More law enforcement, even at the lowest levels, acts as a deterrent to further crime. The problem is when we do nothing then people feel like they can get away with anything.
I'm seeing this in nyc right now. Twice this week I've witnessed people acting violently in public. They know there will be no repercussions, and everyone else does too.
Law enforcement helps to a degree, but it's not an efficient way of reducing crime. If it was, we would have solved this problem a long time ago.
Personally, the reason I don't rob stores is that it's a waste of time. Software development is easier and pays far better than robbery. There's no moral aspect to it.
If other people are robbing stores, they must be in a position where they think robbery is their most profitable option. Maybe they are desperate and need money today, maybe they don't have the skills to do anything more useful. In any case, that type of situation should never happen.
>Twice this week I've witnessed people acting violently in public. They know there will be no repercussions
It's not that they know there will be no repercussions, it's that they have nothing to lose. They don't have a career to keep or money or a house or the respect of others. They aren't integrated with society. You don't see politicians or executives doing this.
Or put another way: what's the reward for good behavior? It should be much, much higher than the reward for crime, to the extent that people would never commit crimes simply because it's not a good use of their time.
> It's not that they know there will be no repercussions, it's that they have nothing to lose.
Yes, well, where I grew up there were plenty of people with nothing to lose that behaved civilly. Because if they didn't, cops took care of business and the perpetrator would walk away with a broken nose or rib or two, while the mentally ill would be locked up in asylums. It seems that in SF these options are not available for various reasons.
(edit: so I guess they did have something to lose).
The Netherlands is really fucked up in this regard. I don't think Americans truly understand how some European countries are AGING and how much birth rates are declining. The US would be the same if it wasn't for immigrants crossing the border.
The situation is so bad that police can't even handle child abuse cases because there aren't enough detectives.
The second disaster as you refer to: criminals don't care if they are caught. Criminals unlike Hollywood says are kinda dumb and desperate. You can put them in jail for shop lifting for a few months at society's expense but they'll just do it again.
Huh, I didn't realize there was an issue in the Netherlands. Are you referring to mentally ill/addicted people like the parent comment? Or the police being stretched thin?
I will admit Amsterdam is certainly not a bit as safe as the Hague/Rotterdam/Delft in my experience, but even then it appears (to me) to be relatively tame.
That’s an interesting premise. I wonder if anyone is able to track the stolen merchandise to figure out where it ends up after the theft? If you can squeeze demand, that should make the activity less profitable and reduce theft.
But I have no idea about what is stolen, where it ends up, etc… I’m sure someone does this, but it isn’t widely publicized, probably for good reason.
The police are only part of the problem, the criminals still needs to be charged and convicted. There was a reason SF recalled their DA. Also, many of these people are mentally ill, and the arrest can turn physical. In the current environment, police have very little room to make mistakes and even if they do everything according to their training, public opinion can really go against them (see Nicholas Reardon). Nobody wants to be public enemy #1 for doing their job.
Imagine reading an honest job description for being a police officer:
* Good benefits, poor hours
* Willing to risk life to save others even if they hate you.
* Must make split second life and death decisions and if you are wrong, you can go to jail for lifetime.
* You will be recorded and every important decision will be second guessed by people who have never done the job
* Even if you follow training perfectly, public opinion might go against you which could lead to criminal charges.
Can you image taking a sys admin job like that? Hackernews would laugh non-stop at that posting. But we expect less educated people to do that job for less money. Good luck with that plan.
Just like we have done to teachers in our schools, I think we have made the job almost impossible. In a more gentle society, I can see the plan working, but in our current cities, I think our expectations are complete fiction.
You've more elaborately written my exact thoughts on the subject. Anytime I hear on HN about how we need more people to do a job, I think, "would you want to do that job?", or maybe more relevant, "would you want your kids to do that job?". I suppose it could be taken as a snarky, gotcha question, but it's a question I ask myself often. Someone's kids have to do these jobs.
* Carte blanc opportunity to deliver violence on anyone you hate
* Must make split second life and death decisions, and you've qualified immunity to protect you even from deliberate wrongdoings
* You will be joining a team whose reputation is so miserable that they're asked to record everything; those cameras can be turned off or trashed.
* If you fail to follow your training perfectly, you're probably going to be able to keep your job through to retirement anyway.
Can you imagine what kinds of people take jobs like this?
One thing that you and I agree on — in a more gentle society, police departments would work. We've spent the past forty years dismantling society, tearing the copper wiring out of every support structure for the lower class, and driven people deeper into poverty. If we didn't create a society that required stormtroopers to keep order, we wouldn't have this kind of crime or need stormtroopers.
Your last point is very illuminating - If we didn't create a society that required stormtroopers to keep order, we wouldn't have this kind of crime or need stormtroopers.
I feel that people in the lower stratum haven't so much as gotten poorer but rather the other strata have gotten relatively much richer.
However, there are areas in the lower stratum where the rug has been pull out from them in the form of jobs exports (sending MFG overseas) as well as depressing wages via low-skill immigration --these immigrants put price pressure on the native population due to the expanded worker pool.
"Carte blanc opportunity to deliver violence on anyone you hate"
"Must make split second life and death decisions, and you've qualified immunity to protect you even from deliberate wrongdoings"
There was a good Radiolab episode on training that police are given on how to convince juries that they were afraid for their life when they fired their weapons, because the law gives them immunity in that case.
> Must make split second life and death decisions and if you are wrong, you can go to jail for lifetime.
This is not even remotely a good-faith description of the reality. The police brutality cases where there are charges filed are always very obvious deliberate murder by the police. And very few of those go anywhere, only the most blatant receive any kind of sentencing.
I challenge you to present cases where a police officer making an honest split-second mistake has been sentenced to jail.
I don't know if this is the police's problem to solve. Police historically don't solve problems, but rather react to crime reported to them. They aren't Cotopaxi's or other private business' private security detail, and if they were to be tasked with trying to prevent crime before it happened, to profile us, closely watch over our every move, then we'd be literally living a police state. This is worse for society than a big corporation having a problem with shrinkage, or, God forbid, wood boards on their property getting graffitied.
I mean, previous DA’s refusal to act, the whole restorative justice movement, allowing homeless people to occupy the downtown, allowing widespread hard drug street distribution and consumption.. all these policies intend to reduce inequality and injustice.
Really confusing policies by progressives who (probably) mean well.
When Johnny Crackhead leaves the store with a garbage bag of loot, the officer goes to arrest him, and the guy offers some level of resistance. He gets wrestled to the ground cuffed and arrested.
The guy getting arrested files a brutality claim, and the cop is jammed up for a few days with pay. Because the garbage bags of shampoo and shaving cream are <$1500, it’s petit larceny, and the DA won’t prosecute. So the guy gets printed and released assuming no warrants.
When the cop gets off of the leave, the sergeant sits him down and says “Hey asshole, officer bob over there missed his kids concert covering your dumb ass. The lieutenant is pissed because you’re burning his budget.”
Police aren’t idiots and faced with knee-jerk policy, they take the pragmatic approach - do nothing. Same thing happened with shootings. Pre 1990s, people pulling knives on officers would get beaten with a club. Lawsuits/liability made it more pragmatic to leap to lethal force.
Good point. As another commenter said: we've made these jobs impossible because we criticize each and every decision cops make. Then we wonder why they don't do anything.
If I was micromanaged and scrutinized anywhere near the level we micromanage cops, I doubt I could do my job very effectively. I've only had negative cop interactions in my life, but I do empathize over this.
Sadly, I'm not sure how to solve the problem. Today's culture doesn't seem to have any accommodation for people screwing up in any role.
Welcome to your friendly, neighborhood corporate Big Box store. Admittedly, I only saw the armed guards(off-duty LEOs, sometimes in uniform) in L.A. and Houston.
Quite frankly, that will result in a lot of blacks being locked up, which is something SF is trying quite hard to avoid. Remember, this is the same city that decided it wasn't in the public's best interests to share videos of crime in BART stations in order to avoid perpetuating negative stereotypes[0].
And said businesses will blasted all over the news for being racist (because there's going to be a _very obvious_ pattern of who is denied entry). Which takes us back to square one. No business is going to want to be a party to the inevitable shitstorm that will come of it.
Are you suggesting blacks are more likely to be criminals? That is impossible... and frankly in a few years nobody will care.
If anything this system can be promoted and sold as barrier from right wing extremism. Now you can physically ban tump supporters and antivagers from your shop!
Edit: also shop owners and security can be black...
I sometimes feel it's as if we were having a conversation about fire, with one side advocating for having building codes so fires are less likely to start in the first place, and the other advocating for having fire departments put out the fires. Or one side was advocating for safer road and car design so that people don't get injured in auto accidents in the first place, and the other side was advocating for emergency rooms to treat people who get injured in auto accidents.
Clearly we need both long-term solutions and short-term, and the police and jails are not the long-term solution but they are necessary, like fire departments and emergency rooms. If we have more fires or more auto accidents, we need more funding for fire departments or emergency rooms, at least until the longer term solutions have time to start working. I don't see why this is even a partisan issue. San Francisco (and many other cities in the US currently) need an increased police presence and more dangerous people put in jail, as a way of coping with the short-term consequences. We need improvements in police and especially jails, but that doesn't change the fact that an increase is needed in the short term at least.
SFPD is the most over-funded and over-staffed agency in the state, and the worst-performing one at the same time. The very last thing SF needs is a bigger police budget so more cops can stand around idly.
This may be the case, but your link doesn't really prove the point. SFPD is certainly not over-staffed, with half the per capita police force of most major cities. Per capita statistics in San Francisco also need to be adjusted because the _resident_ population is much smaller than the _daytime_ population due to land use issues.
In addition, the police standing idly is an unfounded claim. As far as I can tell, a major part of the problem is that each police action takes a huge amount of overhead to execute. Booking a suspect is a multi-hour trip to the station.
Someone was repeatedly breaking into my apartment lobby to steal mail. The police told me they couldn’t do anything unless I had video of it. So I caught the crime on video, identified them, and went to the police station with the video. They said they wouldn’t do anything because it wouldn’t be prosecuted anyway.
Oh, and they also warned me not to confront the perp or do anything myself or they might arrest me. The same person continued to steal packages, and I moved.
which is weird to me - video evidence should mean a slam-dunk case is it not?
So the reason it isn't going to be prosecuted is political then? Which means a failing of the system and institutions. This is an indication of a deeper problem. Moving is the individual's solution of course, but that's not a real solution for the state.
I could tell you a dozen similar stories about every part of the San Francisco or state bureaucracy. Does that mean they’re all over staffed and over funded?
If booking a suspect takes multiple hours of work by the booking officers, I could see why the police would not want to allocate the few officers they have on any shift to that job for a mail thief.
I feel like there's a weird dynamic out there where the folks pushing hard for real change in policing, also have ideas that aren't palatable (or at least seem not to be) to the majority of voters... who otherwise I think wouldn't be entirely opposed to some changes...
So you get this situation where there's a strong will to do something, but the process gets locked up.
In Minneapolis there was a vote to replace the police department, it failed. The whole discussion surrounding it was a mess. Discussions where you took issue with the approach to replacing it inevitably involved accusations of racism and etc. Even just taking issue with the slogans about "Defund the police" (I felt that was not a good route to get folks on board) would result in being accused of being some pro police nazi or something.
The proposal was defeated even in neighborhoods that supporters felt would obviously support it.
If they're like the police in Austin Texas, it's pretty much an understanding amongst the police force that since the BLM riots and extreme fallout during and after that with the public, police will not respond to (or will put forth only the minimum they can get away with) for petty crime and traffic enforcement. We're going on 2 years now and enforcement has become a complete joke.
Agreed, there's gotta be space between "no consequences / ignore X things" and "this process for any crime is so arduous that it will potentially upend someone's life".
Along with outreach, help, but also help that improves everyone's life, including the folks who are victims in all this.
Because one side wants to treat the underlying causes, which it sees as poverty, inequality, lack of good education, and lack of opportunities; while the other side has the attitude of "fuck 'em, they're criminals", and wants to be "tough on crime" by increasing policing, criminal penalties, and the number of people thrown in jail.
The former side sees the justice system as fundamentally unjust and favoring the privileged, connected, and wealthy, and as discriminating against the poor.. as disproportionately affecting blue collar criminals while giving white collar criminals a slap on the wrist (if that).
Jail is seen as both a finishing school for criminals and a human rights disaster, where inmates are not actually reformed but come out as more tied in to the criminal underworld than ever, and where after they are released society almost forces them in to reoffending because legal work opportunities for those with a criminal record are so limited and many inmates learn nothing in jail except how to commit crimes more effectively.
Many see the police as abusive and corrupt, with the recent exposes on police brutality, murder, and corruption just throwing fuel on the fire. Police cultures which try to cover up abuses within their own organizations instead of bringing them to light make the general public even more distrusting. Giving more funding to police departments which betrayed the trust of their communities is seen by some as funding a criminal organization.
Meanwhile, the other side sees those police who are caught abusing their power as just a few bad apples (if that... some will support the police no matter what crimes they commit), and deny that there are systemic issues which need to be addressed. For some of these it's always the criminal's fault, if someone's in jail they deserve it, and the justice system is in fact fair and just.
That's not to mention vigilante, militia, and "patriot" groups which are happy to take the law in to their own hands to fight those they see as enemies.
Attitudes towards drug offenses (which are the reason a huge portion of people are in jail in America) also matter.
These are all very different views of the world, and those are some reasons why criminal justice reform and what should be done with or about police is so controversial.
> Because one side wants to treat the underlying causes, which it sees as poverty, inequality, lack of good education, and lack of opportunities
Well hold on, you're leaving out one critical component. That same side will -- in the face of certain demographics committing the overwhelming about of street crime (like said shoplifting) -- do things like eliminate cash bail, increase the threshold for felony shoplifting, and the like in order to not "destroy minority lives" by throwing them in jail despite repeated violations. There is such a thing as TOO MUCH compassion, but I'm not sure if SF has figured that out yet.
"Because one side wants to treat the underlying causes, which it sees as poverty, inequality, lack of good education, and lack of opportunities"
That side has been running San Francisco for a long long time. It spends $22k per public school student per year, but doesn't manage to teach even half of them to read or write at grade level (which isn't even a high bar).
Either that side doesn't want to solve the problems, or some combination of individual incentives, incompetence and lack of second-order thinking prevents it from achieving its objectives.
Of course, if some of these problems were to disappear, this would reduce the ability for politicians to funnel money to cronies via their non-profit organizations.
> Either that side doesn't want to solve the problems, or some combination of individual incentives, incompetence and lack of second-order thinking prevents it from achieving its objectives.
Homelessness cannot ever be solved at the city, or even state, level. Homeless will, very rationally, tend to migrate and cluster in areas where their lives are a little less bad.
Homelessness can only truly be solved with a nation-wide consistent policy. Anything less simply amounts to shuffling them from one location to another.
Texas doesn't have SF's inequality problems, mostly because Texas houses its population and SF refuses to do it.
The expectation that you can have the world's richest people living cheek by jowl with destitute street dwellers, and not have a wave of property crime, is ridiculous. Property crime is going to rise in proportion to the wealth gradient.
> Why don't big cities in Texas have the same problems with crime?
Well. for one thing, for all the complaints from housing advocates about SF’s inadequate housing density, there are no big, dense cities in Texas, while SF is one of the densest in the US. (The combined city and county is the 5th densest county in the US, the top four all being boroughs of NYC.)
The issues of large agglomerations of suburbia that happen to be in the same political unit aren’t the same as a dense urban core.
127 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadYou gotta wonder how long until normies have had enough and just stop living / going to SF.
And still I have wealthy friends in tech speak of how “it’s really fine these people leaving are just racist.”
The level of contempt with which the laptop class treats the middle is astounding.
For example a health policy requiring health check-ups, or insisting on security or safety measures for a home policy. Or, in a weaker form, giving a discount if the customer can demonstrate they are reducing their risk.
There's also the direct intervention side: in theory, an insurance company covering people in an area for theft could lobby for improved policing. Or a car insurance company could lobby for car safety measures. In practice though they probably prefer the higher risk as that brings higher premiums...
Ideology dictates how people respond to reality. They will insist crime is not bad. They will dig up statistics to fit their narrative -people are over reporting, people are underreporting- anything to deny that property crime is actually worse.
Yes the 80s were bad. You’d get mugged is some parts of the city. However B&E, crime against vehicles and shoplifting were not at the levels today. They insist it’s people who are starving who steal ignoring that it’s organized gangs doing this.
Without care this can turn into North American Sao Paolo where people have compounds with armed guards in the wealthy neighborhoods and the middle class suffer street crime.
Edit: oh, and I accidentally stepped on (and broke) a crack pipe on the sidewalk and had to run from the angry person it belonged to. Remind me to refuse to accept another business trip there.
Article is about Cotopaxi, FYI.
Post some police outside the store. When someone runs in, steals a bunch of items, and runs out, arrest them. What am I not understanding about law enforcement in this situation?
You don't have to catch and convict them every time to be effective. If you caught and convicted even 2% of the crimes, crime would be massively lower within 6 months, because it's the same people doing it over and over.
SF still has a lot of work to do but Chessa Boudin is no longer running the SF DA's office.
The folks running in shoplifting and robbery gangs are not stealing a loaf of bread to feed their starving children, criminality is their profession.
Yes, poverty and crime do correlate strongly. Although be careful about conflating violent crime and property crime with each other.
That said, correlation is not causation. There is likely /some/ causative element between poverty and crime, but it is not absolute, rather poverty is also strongly correlated with other non-criminal behaviors that both lead to poverty and lead to crime. There is definitely a cultural element in wealthy countries to generational poverty, just as there is a cultural element to criminality.
If we can break that cycle for people, it benefits society as a whole, and I think it's worth investing what we can as a society into doing so, however current research certainly doesn't support deferment of responsibility for criminality because of poverty.
Except that's just not true. The US has thousands of mostly independent police departments. Some use civil asset forfeiture (fewer, now that the supreme court has stepped in). Many don't.
What a small town in Alabama does has no connection with what the SFPD does.
If you look at SF compstat, larceny-theft is on pace to be about 34,000 citywide this year, which will put thefts for this year lower than every year 2013-2019, and higher than 2020-21, which were exceptionally low (pandemic).
If you look at the FBI UCR report you'll see that clearance of theft is on a 40-year-long monotonic decline. Theft rate was about the same around 1990, but the SFPD clearance rate was 3-5x higher back then. This has nothing to do with the DA and everything to do with the SFPD being a civic cancer who refuse to do their jobs.
Anyway if you want to know why we have to constantly hear about thefts in SF which are objectively at the lowest levels in a recent years, here's the explanation for that: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/26/crime-mid...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article...
When the district attorney is busy busting a car burglary gang, doing the SFPD's job for them, the SFPD refuses to help.
https://www.ksbw.com/article/sfpd-refused-to-help-stop-san-f...
SFPD is a reactionary gang who are invested in making crime in SF be and appear to be as bad as possible.
Maybe...but the two might be related, no? After some years of the police observing that the people they arrest are released with no charges and no prosecution, why would they bother to keep arresting people? It sounds demoralizing.
Police productivity and effectiveness is a nationwide crisis.
45 traffic enforcement offices only manager to give out an average of 10 ticks every day. That’s not each, that’s as a whole department. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article...
At the same time, I've lived in US cities for the past 7 years. 6 months ago, I moved to a small town. Why? It wasn't because I don't like city amenities, or I can't afford city prices. I moved because the city I lived in didn't feel safe. Between the rampant bike theft, the rampant auto theft, the break-ins, and the muggings, I did not feel like trying to walk and bike around my city any more. It just felt too risky.
Times were that the shop owner would physically stop shop lifters. Now we mostly have low wage employees in shops. Understandable that they don't want the risk of injury and liability so they don't stop shoplifters.
Ok, so we hire specialized employees ostensibly trained in security. But due to liability reasons they aren't allowed to physically stop shoplifters. That makes them basically useless.
Ok, so well there's always cops. But they have a similar cost benefit analysis as the other parties with the same result. It's not worth it to the individual cops to intervene. Why risk going viral over some druggie stealing $100 worth of stuff?
The DA/politicians have a similar calculus. Why spend $50k locking up some druggie because they stole $100 worth of stuff? And why risk the blowback of a police brutality incident?
I'm sure that's a factor, but physical altercations also bring risk to the cop. I don't know how generous their disability pensions are, but I suspect it's better for them and their family to still be able to work. Also, anyone in the US can be armed which tends to raise the stakes that cops perceive with every interaction - look at their training material/propaganda sometime and it paints a very adversarial picture.
It's not their money, so many of them have no problem spending it.
That's not to mention those who personally benefit from putting more people in jail because they have investments in the prison industry, get some sort of bribe/kickback, or just have an easier time getting elected/appointed because they're "tough on crime".
Unfortunately, it almost always takes more time to build things than destroy them, so the damage may take a long tome to reverse.
https://www.hoover.org/research/why-shoplifting-now-de-facto...
If you have large numbers of mentally ill and/or drug addicted people living on the streets with little to lose then it's pretty easy to do a DDOS to the rest of society.
Like drug dealing, you really want to catch the people a couple of steps up the chain, as the people on the frontline are just disposable cannon fodder and easily replaceable.
A new DA will take time to right this ship. At least the new one has intention to arrest crime where the other one was sympathetic to criminals.
I'm seeing this in nyc right now. Twice this week I've witnessed people acting violently in public. They know there will be no repercussions, and everyone else does too.
Personally, the reason I don't rob stores is that it's a waste of time. Software development is easier and pays far better than robbery. There's no moral aspect to it.
If other people are robbing stores, they must be in a position where they think robbery is their most profitable option. Maybe they are desperate and need money today, maybe they don't have the skills to do anything more useful. In any case, that type of situation should never happen.
>Twice this week I've witnessed people acting violently in public. They know there will be no repercussions
It's not that they know there will be no repercussions, it's that they have nothing to lose. They don't have a career to keep or money or a house or the respect of others. They aren't integrated with society. You don't see politicians or executives doing this.
Or put another way: what's the reward for good behavior? It should be much, much higher than the reward for crime, to the extent that people would never commit crimes simply because it's not a good use of their time.
Yes, well, where I grew up there were plenty of people with nothing to lose that behaved civilly. Because if they didn't, cops took care of business and the perpetrator would walk away with a broken nose or rib or two, while the mentally ill would be locked up in asylums. It seems that in SF these options are not available for various reasons.
(edit: so I guess they did have something to lose).
The second disaster as you refer to: criminals don't care if they are caught. Criminals unlike Hollywood says are kinda dumb and desperate. You can put them in jail for shop lifting for a few months at society's expense but they'll just do it again.
I will admit Amsterdam is certainly not a bit as safe as the Hague/Rotterdam/Delft in my experience, but even then it appears (to me) to be relatively tame.
But I have no idea about what is stolen, where it ends up, etc… I’m sure someone does this, but it isn’t widely publicized, probably for good reason.
Imagine reading an honest job description for being a police officer:
Can you image taking a sys admin job like that? Hackernews would laugh non-stop at that posting. But we expect less educated people to do that job for less money. Good luck with that plan.Just like we have done to teachers in our schools, I think we have made the job almost impossible. In a more gentle society, I can see the plan working, but in our current cities, I think our expectations are complete fiction.
* Unbelievable benefits, poor hours
* Carte blanc opportunity to deliver violence on anyone you hate
* Must make split second life and death decisions, and you've qualified immunity to protect you even from deliberate wrongdoings
* You will be joining a team whose reputation is so miserable that they're asked to record everything; those cameras can be turned off or trashed.
* If you fail to follow your training perfectly, you're probably going to be able to keep your job through to retirement anyway.
Can you imagine what kinds of people take jobs like this?
One thing that you and I agree on — in a more gentle society, police departments would work. We've spent the past forty years dismantling society, tearing the copper wiring out of every support structure for the lower class, and driven people deeper into poverty. If we didn't create a society that required stormtroopers to keep order, we wouldn't have this kind of crime or need stormtroopers.
However, there are areas in the lower stratum where the rug has been pull out from them in the form of jobs exports (sending MFG overseas) as well as depressing wages via low-skill immigration --these immigrants put price pressure on the native population due to the expanded worker pool.
"Must make split second life and death decisions, and you've qualified immunity to protect you even from deliberate wrongdoings"
There was a good Radiolab episode on training that police are given on how to convince juries that they were afraid for their life when they fired their weapons, because the law gives them immunity in that case.
It’s impossible to charge someone who wasn’t arrested or, in the rare occasion they are arrested, with shoddy evidence work.
The police even had their own catalytic converters stolen
This is not even remotely a good-faith description of the reality. The police brutality cases where there are charges filed are always very obvious deliberate murder by the police. And very few of those go anywhere, only the most blatant receive any kind of sentencing.
I challenge you to present cases where a police officer making an honest split-second mistake has been sentenced to jail.
You have less crime when people aren’t dramatically poor compared to others in the area and have access to care.
Really confusing policies by progressives who (probably) mean well.
The guy getting arrested files a brutality claim, and the cop is jammed up for a few days with pay. Because the garbage bags of shampoo and shaving cream are <$1500, it’s petit larceny, and the DA won’t prosecute. So the guy gets printed and released assuming no warrants.
When the cop gets off of the leave, the sergeant sits him down and says “Hey asshole, officer bob over there missed his kids concert covering your dumb ass. The lieutenant is pissed because you’re burning his budget.”
Police aren’t idiots and faced with knee-jerk policy, they take the pragmatic approach - do nothing. Same thing happened with shootings. Pre 1990s, people pulling knives on officers would get beaten with a club. Lawsuits/liability made it more pragmatic to leap to lethal force.
If I was micromanaged and scrutinized anywhere near the level we micromanage cops, I doubt I could do my job very effectively. I've only had negative cop interactions in my life, but I do empathize over this.
Sadly, I'm not sure how to solve the problem. Today's culture doesn't seem to have any accommodation for people screwing up in any role.
0: https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/bart-withholding-s...
And said businesses will blasted all over the news for being racist (because there's going to be a _very obvious_ pattern of who is denied entry). Which takes us back to square one. No business is going to want to be a party to the inevitable shitstorm that will come of it.
If anything this system can be promoted and sold as barrier from right wing extremism. Now you can physically ban tump supporters and antivagers from your shop!
Edit: also shop owners and security can be black...
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6988177...
Clearly we need both long-term solutions and short-term, and the police and jails are not the long-term solution but they are necessary, like fire departments and emergency rooms. If we have more fires or more auto accidents, we need more funding for fire departments or emergency rooms, at least until the longer term solutions have time to start working. I don't see why this is even a partisan issue. San Francisco (and many other cities in the US currently) need an increased police presence and more dangerous people put in jail, as a way of coping with the short-term consequences. We need improvements in police and especially jails, but that doesn't change the fact that an increase is needed in the short term at least.
http://www.cjcj.org/news/13268
In addition, the police standing idly is an unfounded claim. As far as I can tell, a major part of the problem is that each police action takes a huge amount of overhead to execute. Booking a suspect is a multi-hour trip to the station.
Oh, and they also warned me not to confront the perp or do anything myself or they might arrest me. The same person continued to steal packages, and I moved.
which is weird to me - video evidence should mean a slam-dunk case is it not?
So the reason it isn't going to be prosecuted is political then? Which means a failing of the system and institutions. This is an indication of a deeper problem. Moving is the individual's solution of course, but that's not a real solution for the state.
If booking a suspect takes multiple hours of work by the booking officers, I could see why the police would not want to allocate the few officers they have on any shift to that job for a mail thief.
So you get this situation where there's a strong will to do something, but the process gets locked up.
In Minneapolis there was a vote to replace the police department, it failed. The whole discussion surrounding it was a mess. Discussions where you took issue with the approach to replacing it inevitably involved accusations of racism and etc. Even just taking issue with the slogans about "Defund the police" (I felt that was not a good route to get folks on board) would result in being accused of being some pro police nazi or something.
The proposal was defeated even in neighborhoods that supporters felt would obviously support it.
Along with outreach, help, but also help that improves everyone's life, including the folks who are victims in all this.
Because one side wants to treat the underlying causes, which it sees as poverty, inequality, lack of good education, and lack of opportunities; while the other side has the attitude of "fuck 'em, they're criminals", and wants to be "tough on crime" by increasing policing, criminal penalties, and the number of people thrown in jail.
The former side sees the justice system as fundamentally unjust and favoring the privileged, connected, and wealthy, and as discriminating against the poor.. as disproportionately affecting blue collar criminals while giving white collar criminals a slap on the wrist (if that).
Jail is seen as both a finishing school for criminals and a human rights disaster, where inmates are not actually reformed but come out as more tied in to the criminal underworld than ever, and where after they are released society almost forces them in to reoffending because legal work opportunities for those with a criminal record are so limited and many inmates learn nothing in jail except how to commit crimes more effectively.
Many see the police as abusive and corrupt, with the recent exposes on police brutality, murder, and corruption just throwing fuel on the fire. Police cultures which try to cover up abuses within their own organizations instead of bringing them to light make the general public even more distrusting. Giving more funding to police departments which betrayed the trust of their communities is seen by some as funding a criminal organization.
Meanwhile, the other side sees those police who are caught abusing their power as just a few bad apples (if that... some will support the police no matter what crimes they commit), and deny that there are systemic issues which need to be addressed. For some of these it's always the criminal's fault, if someone's in jail they deserve it, and the justice system is in fact fair and just.
That's not to mention vigilante, militia, and "patriot" groups which are happy to take the law in to their own hands to fight those they see as enemies.
Attitudes towards drug offenses (which are the reason a huge portion of people are in jail in America) also matter.
These are all very different views of the world, and those are some reasons why criminal justice reform and what should be done with or about police is so controversial.
Well hold on, you're leaving out one critical component. That same side will -- in the face of certain demographics committing the overwhelming about of street crime (like said shoplifting) -- do things like eliminate cash bail, increase the threshold for felony shoplifting, and the like in order to not "destroy minority lives" by throwing them in jail despite repeated violations. There is such a thing as TOO MUCH compassion, but I'm not sure if SF has figured that out yet.
That side has been running San Francisco for a long long time. It spends $22k per public school student per year, but doesn't manage to teach even half of them to read or write at grade level (which isn't even a high bar).
Either that side doesn't want to solve the problems, or some combination of individual incentives, incompetence and lack of second-order thinking prevents it from achieving its objectives.
Of course, if some of these problems were to disappear, this would reduce the ability for politicians to funnel money to cronies via their non-profit organizations.
Homelessness cannot ever be solved at the city, or even state, level. Homeless will, very rationally, tend to migrate and cluster in areas where their lives are a little less bad.
Homelessness can only truly be solved with a nation-wide consistent policy. Anything less simply amounts to shuffling them from one location to another.
I never saw any homeless in Shanghai, and only one sidewalk beggar. I asked what they did to make it so, "We don't talk about that".
"A few bad apples", is only the first part of the expression that ends with: "spoil the batch". I think it is applicable here as well.
Why don't big cities in Texas have the same problems with crime? I don't think TX has more social programs than SF.
The expectation that you can have the world's richest people living cheek by jowl with destitute street dwellers, and not have a wave of property crime, is ridiculous. Property crime is going to rise in proportion to the wealth gradient.
I'm trying to find a source that lists Houston as having meaningfully less crime than SF.
https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/tx/houston/crime vs https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime (This shows SF having considerably less violent crime compared to Houston, but slightly more property crime).
Even in a self reported survey, I don't see much difference from people who live in these places: https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Uni...
Well. for one thing, for all the complaints from housing advocates about SF’s inadequate housing density, there are no big, dense cities in Texas, while SF is one of the densest in the US. (The combined city and county is the 5th densest county in the US, the top four all being boroughs of NYC.)
The issues of large agglomerations of suburbia that happen to be in the same political unit aren’t the same as a dense urban core.